My Nexus S Is Sick And Your’s Might Catch What It Has

It started one morning when I picked up my Samsung Nexus S after leaving it to charge up overnight. I pressed the on button and nothing happened, the screen was completely blank, and the only way I could get the phone to power on was to pull out the battery and plug it back in. For the next several days I had the same experience every morning. My first thought was that an app that I recently installed was causing the phone to lock up, so I uninstalled every app that I installed up to when the problem first appeared, but that did not fix the problem.

Getting more irritated, my next step was to install the Android 2.3.3 update that I had been patiently waiting to be pushed over-the-air to my Nexus S, and still the problem persisted. In fact, to my horror, the problem got worse because while before I was able to at least get through a day without a problem, now my phone started locking up in as little as 30 minutes.

The final thing that I could try was to perform a full factory reset of the phone, which wiped out all data and apps on the phone. Unfortunately, this too did not solve the problem, at which point I decided I had exhausted every possible troubleshooting step that I could perform.

My next step was to contact Samsung, and I decided to send a tweet to @GalaxySsupport. I was very happy to get a fast direct message response but what I learned was disturbing. What I am experiencing is a known problem for which Samsung is working on a fix, but that is currently not available. I do not know whether Samsung has publicly provided a statement about this problem, but a Google employee has posted on Google’s support forum that they know about the problem and are working on a fix.

At this point my Nexus S is unusable and I do not know when it will be fixed. Fortunately for me, I can fall back to my Nexus One, but most people do not have several smartphones. All I can do at this point is watch the Google support forum for a post that says that a fix is available. So far only a little more than 50 people have posted on the forum, but there is no way of knowing how many people have contacted Samsung.